[42109] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Analysis from a JHU CS Prof
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dean Robb)
Thu Sep 13 14:13:29 2001
Message-Id: <5.0.2.1.1.20010913140041.049cbb50@198.68.200.17>
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 14:07:32 -0400
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: Dean Robb <Dean@PC-Easy-va.com>
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At 06:05 PM 9/12/2001, you wrote:
>Quite more interesting is why nobody noticed that 4 airliners where hijacked
>almost the same time.
Not surprising. Aircraft are "flight followed" by a series of control
centers across the nation, each responsible for a given chunk of
airspace. Something happening in an area controlled by Center "A", for
example, wouldn't be passed on to Center "B" (which has it's own problems
to work) unless it impacted Center "B". Furthermore, unless someone TELLS
Center they're being hijacked, there's no way for a controller - looking at
a blip - to know what's up. And any controller can tell you that pilots do
some strange things sometimes; that radios fail, that airline operations
tell planes to change destinations and the controllers aren't told, etc.
In these cases, most of the knowledge that a plane was hijacked came from
passengers on phones, not the cockpits. And even if it was known
immediately that these planes were being hijacked - what could anyone on
the ground do?
Dean Robb
www.PC-Easy-va.com
On-site computer services
Member, ICANN At Large
